Bozka Rydlewska

 

 New botany series, 100 x 70 cm, mixed media, fine art print on hahnemuhle photo rag

Bozka Rydlewska

Bożka Rydlewska - lllustrator and graphic designer, born in 1977. Bożka studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow, Poland and at Högskolan för Design och Konsthantverk in Goteborg, Sweden. Her subtle illustrations of ornamental and oneiric kingdom of plants form a unique style.

http://vimeo.com/62341653
This is a video of a current level six student's work, Jade Simpson. The video I feel is of interest to me as the forms created and held within the gelatin are very organic, and remind me a lot of sci-fi aliens and forms, such as "The Blob".

Turkey Tail Fungus

"...Turkey tail fungi are actually called conks or artist conks because the bottom can be carved or even just defaced. Their age can be determined by cutting them in half and counting the layers. They always grow on a horizontal plane so if the growth is perpendicular to the trunk it grew whilst the tree was standing whereas if it is parallel with the trunk it grew whilst laying down. Damn! Things that make you go hmmm… Their Latin name is Ganoderma applanatum.

...how the fungi spreads. The spores can be taken up through the roots or enter through a break in the bark. So always clean your pruning tools."

From Tumblr Post Here.

Goldenroach Exhibition

Goldenroach Unlimited Műcsarnok / Kunsthalle

1st legal exhibition

Curator: Gabriella Zsinka

In what is a surprise domestic stage in visual artist kissmiklos’s action series, M0, Műcsarnok’s project gallery gives home to the installation entitled Goldenroach Unlimited. The exhibition-goers of other countries have had a chance to encounter the insects of the Goldenroach project, which Kiss smuggled into prestigious exhibition halls across Europe, since 2011. The artist also made certain to fit the insects that found their ways into the MuMoK (Vienna), the Saatchi Gallery and the Tate Modern (London), the Louvre and the Centre George Pompidou (Paris), or the Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin), with display labels that matched the look of the current exhibit, making the uninvited guests part of the displays. Later he would plant, in a similar manner, his goldenroach-based souvenirs in the museum gift shops.

Smuggled into the international temples of art, kissmiklos’s goldenroaches are temporarily “deified”, as were scarabs in Egyptianculture. By contrast, the fake gold cockroaches in Műcsarnok, made from injection moulded plastic ( the mould itself being handmade), seem to lack any originality and majesty, like all other cheap, mass-produced figurines of the toy industry, even tough these bear a striking resemblance to their golden counterpart.

Gathering in the middle of the hall, and counting more than ten thousand, this army of insects also attests to the power of organization and representation. While in the foreign galleries the roach, i.e. the artist, seeks to avoid the attention of security guards and cameras, the golden cockroaches are now the very subject of the exhibit in M0—as legal occupants, their identity and deification are put into question. They are centre stage now, and a live stream will allow anyone to follow their fate round the clock.

The artist will soon continue the action series he started three years ago in overseas locations.

"This is an art movement during which I have smuggled in 14 carat gold plated bronze roaches into the Tate Modern, Tate Britain, British Museum, MUMOK (Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien) and Hamburger Bahnhof, making them part of current exhibition, in June 2011. The young artist gets into the sanctuary of visual arts like a cockroach. The roach as a carrier of the message is not a random choice, and naturally the used material itself has multiple symbolic values. The roach is one of the most disgusting insects, which is capable of getting inside anything, and also earned a doubled fame in public awareness by its imperishability. People treat the roach as a synonym for disgust because of the common repugnance it causes, but at the same time, as an insect which is capable of adapting the most extreme situations, it is a symbol of survival. Naturally, other insects from the history of art also act in a live picture about my work, for example the scarab from Egyptian culture, where it is showed as a godly symbol, and therefore it is mainly made of gold. But, for my ideas an insect of the opposite meaning was more suitable. This is why I chose the roach at the end. It is found anywhere in the World, considered everywhere as a pest and a source of infections, and exterminated anywhere possible. Opposite to this, the roaches in my creations go through multiple changes. Walking into the culture’s holy space, they turn to gold in the museums, which represent art, and this pushes the question of art. At this point the action is made classic and contemporary at the same time." 

 

Group Feedback Critique

• More organic frame (underneath), remove when dry? use branches as a frame, leave them?
• Less detail in the drawings, could allow more possibilities with the tracing paper
• Light the tracing paper?
• Could present the small botanical drawings nicely framed, don't rule them out, could show both drawings and sculptural tracing paper work
• Hanging tracing paper from a window (front gallery) allows light to travel through
• Drawings and tracing paper piece work best together
• May need to dominate a space, or a large space that it controls

Jessica Longmore Tutorial

• Tracing paper - try different varieties (fine tissue paper)
• scope for different ideas, repetition, traces of things, light traveling through it, layering
• Sculptural elements
• Scaling drawings up - use projector? links into tracing ideas
•  If choosing to use idea of destruction, do it in a subtle way, water on tracing paper etc
• Didn't really need frame, use architecture of the exhibition area to sculpt the work, existing framework to work within
• Book idea - stacks of paper, doesn't necessarily need a spine
• Supernatural qualities

BoiDivLibrary - Flickr Archive

https://www.flickr.com/photos/biodivlibrary/sets/

I've discovered a massive archive of botanical, scientific and natural history illustrations. I'm thinking I could use these somehow as inspiration or reference images.

Alexis Rockman

Alexis Rockman paints plants and animals in a style that also draws on diverse sources including Dutch flower painting, nineteenth century landscape painting, science fiction movies, and natural history dioramas. Nature in Rockman’s work is a Hobbesian spectacle in which ants devour butterflies, flowers drip sinister nectars, and human creations proliferate amid feces, traps, and evolutionary cul-de-sacs. An atmosphere of luxurious decay pervades not only the subject matter, but color and use of materials. Rockman favors sickly greens, lurid reds and golds, and deep shadows. His glazes are so heavy that some canvases glisten like hams. Rockman’s most blackly humorous works synthesize genetic engineering and pornography.

A History of Art involving DNA

 

Anya Gallaccio Research Notes

Her art references Arte Povera - use of inexpensive, everyday? materials. Site based works of limited duration.
Minimalism, loosely referenced but it wholly forced, vague references can be made to how she displays certain works

Not pinned down by one movement or approach, practice development splinters off into many different directions, not easy to generalise her practice

A lot of floor based work, this forces the viewer to change the way they look, demands you to go nearer, have to kneel, squat, bend down to view the work more closely. Wreaks havoc with traditional categories of visual order.

De-emphasises the visual filed in which we typically locate artwork, leads away from preference of sight over other senses - smell, etc become more important in viewing her work.

Low profile location of the work (floor), modest qualities as if it wishes to be barely noticable
leads with other routes of engaement, smell, touch etc
Creates a more intimate engagement with the work, directly suggesting that the art is a collaboration between artist and audience.

Practice involves a shift away from creators egocentric involvement with chosen media, sets up a situation in which the material process is outside of her control, slowly unfolds over time

Not to do with appreciation of natural beauty (like vanitas) - transformation processes, such as decay
No true moment or definitive point of view or encounter with her art, contsantly changing
Art as events rather than objects

Chaotic rush as work is made, assistants needed to help her, but end result must look effortless

Notes of lurking dangers, sense of portent

Art sounds fantastical in description, but in real life seems more down-to-earth, less dramatic or monumental
Work probes quetly and insistently the gap between expectation and reality
Work touches on transformation, and regeration as much as it does drestruction or loss

Very essence of Gallaccio's work that her project grow out of and around, relate to each other - both formally and informally, in terms of emotions and ideas that they generate, like how seeds travel and roots overlap and intersect invisibly under the earth.
Each work generates "mutant offspring" in forms of new work, evolves in organic way

Decomposition reoccuring theme, as waste and as life sustaining process, tension between the attractions of the beautiful and the ugly.
Work harnesses slow process of time - time of crop cycles, seasons, rather than the clock-time we are used to.
Work is located in the present, and looks to the future, not the past.

Sophia Crilly Artist talk 13/03/14

• Bureau Gallery manchester, 8 years
• Artist/curator
• New artist exposure/established, commissions
• Floence Derieux in Harald Szeemann, Individual Methodology, 2007
•  "It is now widely accepted that art history from the second half of the 20th century is not a history of art, but a history of exhibitions."
• Per Huttner - artist/curator
• Creates peer to peer networks between young artists from North West and Manchester
•  Once a year a solo show - artists first solo show
• Lack of opportunities for artists in a mentor environment
• Worked with The cable Factory, Helsinki, Finland, exchange
• Gallery relocated after deciding directions they could take (art fairs, artists selling work)
• Looks at different curators as part of research  
• Walter Hopps - curator "36 hours"
• 36 Days, exhibition open to any Uk artist, no judgment/application process, all art accepted, onluy size limitations
• interested in how to curate the show when you don't know what would arrive 
• encouraging and supporting young artists to develop work and take risks in their practice
• Mary Griffiths, cover paper in graphite, burnish with hot implement, use pins to draw into the surface
• Her solo show - graphite covering 8M wall (took 10 days to cover), normally works A4 size, abstract drawings, but based on architectural spaces
• New gallery in 2013, thinking about people who may not encounter art normally, www.bureaugallery.com
• works with artists while they develop their work, and then often offer shows later on, studio visits, interviews etc with the artist
• Have a range of funders and sponsors, wider range of connections
• Consider how other areas (businesses) could relate to art practice and open opportunities
• Think longer term, not more immediate

Artwork:

• Looking at exhibition curating over last century
• found/archival images - drawings developed from them
• Harals Szeemann, Walter Hopps, Dave Hickey - curators
• Layered, drawn and rubbed out several times before details come into the drawings

How would botanical illustrators respond to my drawings?

From these drawings, I photocopied them and created quick collage-drawings, combining different elements from these drawings. I'm attempting to make ti clear that they're imagined in a fast, effective way that I can develop later.

Michael Day Tutorial

• Typographic paper
• Buy rolls instead of fixing sheets together (improvisation is good, however)
• Figure out how to exhibit them (floor, wall etc)
• Traces of things, paper maché on edge of wall, what's left behind
• Smaller scale, delicate, botanical - larger drawings more sci-fi, imaginative, not objective
• Tracing the same drawing, adapting it at each layer
• Consider ways to display, not just a floor sculpture
• Qualities of drawing on tracing paper
• Drawing onto the wall directly, achieve the watercolour painterly effects in the drawings on tracing paper
• Transparency of the ink - emerging, disappearing
• Separate works, don't have to force several ideas into the one piece, separate them and work on each
• May have several works in the space together
• Transaction between accuracy and error
• John James Audobon
• What does the work say to the viewer?
• Triffid like
• Quatermess (Sci-fi film? Tv series?) Quatermass and the Pit (1958) Bernard Quatermass
• Think about specifying what I'm drawing, habitat etc
• Fungus motif - constantly reappears in my work, ideas of poison, psychedelics, reproduces 'invisibly' - spores, air flow - breath, grows on dead things, death facing

Alan Smith Artist Talk

• Working non-art related job is normal, could actually feed (income) creatively
• Botanical illustrator, Department of Illustration, Swansea
• Starting to find other ways to demonstrate ideas, more fine art, moving away from illustration
• 12 months working in Germany
• Things can drop on you, learn to take opportunities, don't knock chance
• Opportunity to go to America, drove across country, camped in mountains for 3 months
• Lucas Samaras
• Experiencing life isn't not making art
• Traveling a lot, looking for somewhere rural, big enough for ideas of artist community
• Large enough to both live/work in, and room for other artists to stay
• Allenheads - small village, 200 population, old schoolhouse, rents out spaces/rooms
• Skills learnt to maintain studio in New York (plastering, electrics, wall building etc)
• Wherever he goes, builds environment - studios, house etc.
• Caving - took canvases into caves to 'draw'
• Microscopic images, samples taken from suit
• Working with scientists
• Marcus Coates - Birdsong first made in Allenheads on residency (Dawns Chorus)
• If you are on a residency, take time to think before you start creating
• The right question is needed, not the right answer
• Always try something out, if it doesn't work it's fine, can learn from it
• Taking time to consider where you are, 'decompression period'
• All life experiences go into your ptential as an artist
• Fin a way of making sure you have funding instead of moaning about lack of it

Test Exhibition Group Critique Notes

• Have to move around the work, engages the space
• Shipwreck - ripped sails, coral, nature taking over
• organic
• layering (use of canvas and tracing paper
• Drawings continue from one to another, tracing paper added afterwards - confusing, wanting to peel it back
• Purple/brown colour more organic
• Could I use watered down clay/slip?
• Teased apart, could create a book you can flip through on one side, other side of work placed to get away
• different prepositions from each side of the work (contrived)
• Placed outside, breeze could move the materials, weathered, as if it's placed to brace for something
• Statement on painting, criticism on painting, peeling away, fungus growing on it
• Tracing paper holds more possibilities, a better texture, delicate, if something hit it, it could be damaged
• more natural 'draped' effect on behind side
• more layers, heights etc - could play with this
• Wet tissue/paper piled up, destroying itself
• Tracing paper's function - copying, tracing, could I copy botanical illustration, direct copy - play with it's original function but in a different way to intended purpose
• Fungus doesn't need frame, separate work, build it separately
• What can I do to re-stage/develop the work further?
• Layers, more holes in tracing paper to allow sight through
• Layers starting with more observational drawing, going into more imaginary
• Doesn't have to even use a frame, simply stacked or sculptural
• doesn't go far enough, this is a starting point (push it further)
• Destroy frame, old wood, reconstructed branches/tree
• take one side of frame off, see how it falls naturally, leave it
• paper maché - paper making, transluscent pulp based paper
• Making own paper do draw on?

Bharti Kher

Bharti Kher, The Waq Tree, 2009, fiberglass, iron, copper.
Installation view, Art Unlimited, Basel, Switzerland, 2009

"This work takes its origins in the story of the WaqWaq Tree and the WaqWaq islands. This mythological tree bears human heads at the end of its branches, screaming "waqwaq" when they ripe and fall. This myth goes back to as far as AD 766 and may be found in Indian, Persian and Islamic culture."

 http://www.mommybysilasandstathacos.com/2013/11/01/a-conversation-with-bharti-kher/

The Waq Tree. That was a piece that came out of many stories; the first one being from a very small 18th century miniature of a Waq tree from Persia—a speaking tree. I’ve made a lot of trees and I continue to. Alexander the Great, as he crossed Persia/Iran over to the Punjab was told by his seer/psychic to visit the fabled Waq tree and this tree was supposedly in Iran. It had the heads of gargoyles, of hybrids, of animals of no known shape or form. It warned Alexander that he would die if he crossed into India. Alexander the Great was apparently poisoned as he passed through Punjab. What I had thought was that he was shot by a poisoned arrow, but he died of food poisoning, which is a bit boring. So I remember thinking about this tree and always wanting to make the speaking tree, the messenger tree, the portent for the future.

The first set of smaller trees were called the Solarum Series. People ask me about this and say they have been researching it and can’t find anything about it—it’s because I’ve made it up. I make up my own myths and hope for the best. Solarum Series sounds like a proper tree. One that I’ve researched and that’s from a proper academic, scientific journal but actually the Solarus tree is a plant, it’s not even a tree. It’s a plant that goes into other habitats and then destroys everything else, so it’s like the Cuckoo. It goes into places and takes over everything and then dominates like some alien species. The Solarum Series is a tree that speaks. If you plant it in your garden it will kill everything else and it will just keep growing because it is the heads of many, it is the minds of many, it is all me and you.

The fallen tree came about when I did the show for the Baltic. I made a small tree and I made a really huge tree. It was three times the size of the smaller one and they were like mother and child, just as I made the little elephant first and then I made the big one. I would see at some point that they are mother and child and this was very deliberately the baby Solarum and a giant monster one. And during the installation of the work the tree fell over. It came crashing down the day before the opening and we were very lucky actually that nobody got killed because it weighs about two and a half tons. The whole bloody thing fell over. And I watched it miss one of the technicians by about two feet. It made such a sound! And I looked at it and walked straight out of the gallery. My pride. And I called Subodh and said: “My tree’s fallen over. My opening is tomorrow.” And he said: “Um. Okay. Does it look good?” And I was: “What the fuck do you mean, does it look good?” And he said, “Go inside. Does it look good?” So I went in. And, “Shit yes, it looks good.” So he said, “Fix it.” So then, of course, we fixed it. And so nobody knew. I went back in and we fixed the tree and so we made it look like it hadn’t accidentally fallen over. I repaired it. There were no cracks. I just left it on the floor as it was. But if you had moved it, the whole thing would have fallen apart. The body was broken, but the heads were really strong. The heads were cast in my studio and the rest was made in China. And I don’t think it was made specifically well in terms of material or engineering.

The lesson of that was make everything in your studio so that you’ve handled the production because my works are so organic in some ways. So sometimes good things come out of accidents. I asked the installation team to cut off all the heads and send them back to my studio, and we made another tree, took a crane and pushed the tree over on the floor and it broke like it had fallen, which is different than just creating a broken tree. So it had that same sort of crashing effect of the weight, where the different branches just collapse under itself and then we re-fixed it and we reinforced it, and reassembled it. That was a really great project for me in many ways. Just in terms of pure practical production, that work really taught me how much I do know about engineering and production and I really trust myself to make the work now.